Moons news, articles and features | New Ů��С��Ƶ

Hundreds of new moons are revealing our solar system’s violent history

Jonathan O’Callaghan — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:00:31 +0000

The outer solar system once seemed like a quiet backwater. But a glut of tiny, strange moons with unruly orbits are coming into view, revealing hints of a surprising past – and the origin of Saturn's rings

The rings of Uranus are even stranger than we thought

Leah Crane — Fri, 01 May 2026 07:00:01 +0000

Uranus’s outermost two rings are surprisingly dissimilar, which opens up a mystery about the tiny moons and moonlets that form them

Titan’s strange plains may be explained by unusual weather

Leah Crane — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:00:44 +0000

An image of Titan taken by the Cassini spacecraft during a flyby

NASA/JPL/SSI/Val Klavans

Titan’s plains may be covered in up to a metre of fluffy, organic “snow”. About 65 per cent of the surface of Saturn’s huge moon is made up of strangely uniform and flat plains, and they seem to be coated in a porous, dry layer of particles that have fallen from the sky.

The surface of Titan is difficult to study from afar because it is obscured by a thick, hazy atmosphere. The Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, managed to take a closer look using radar. Now, at Cornell University in New York state and his colleagues have analysed the radar data in more detail than ever before.

The way the radio waves from Cassini’s radar instrument bounced off Titan’s surface indicate that the surface isn’t as simple as those of most other rocky bodies in the solar system. “The canonical models that we use to try to understand Titan’s surface, which were developed for the moon and are used for the moon, Earth, Venus – they don’t work directly on Titan,” says Hayes. “Titan is a different beast in terms of the radar-scattering properties of the surface.”

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The most stunning pictures from Artemis II’s flyby of the moon

Instead of a simple rocky surface, the radar data was a better fit to a two-layer model, with a blanket of soft, low-density material covering a harder terrain. The blanket layer, ranging from centimetres to a metre in thickness, is probably made up of organic molecules from Titan’s hazy atmosphere, which researchers expect should float down to the surface like snow before getting compacted and solidified over time.

Titan’s surface also experiences rain, wind and erosion, so it is important to understand how the blanket layer has built up slowly over time, shaped by these processes. “But this could give us a hint for how things work more broadly on Titan,” says Hayes.

NASA’s Dragonfly mission, which is expected to launch in 2028 and arrive on Titan in 2034, should be able to measure these layers and help us figure out exactly how they formed. It is crucial not only for our understanding of Titan itself, but also for the design of any future spacecraft that will follow Dragonfly to visit this strange moon and attempt landing there.

Journal reference

Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets

Saturn’s rings may have formed after a huge collision with Titan

Leah Crane — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:00:24 +0000

Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, may have been even more instrumental to the system’s evolution than we thought, forming its rings, shaping its moons and even affecting the planet itself

Synchronised volcanic eruptions on Io hint at a spongy interior

Leah Crane — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 14:00:46 +0000

Five volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io erupted simultaneously, spewing a mind-boggling amount of lava onto the surface and giving us clues to what may lie underneath

More than 100 moons were discovered in our own solar system in 2025

Matthew Sparkes — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 11:00:17 +0000

Astronomers discovered a new moon of Uranus and hundreds of moons around Saturn over the past year, and there may be many more yet to be found

Mars may once have had a much larger moon

Bas den Hond — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 15:00:49 +0000

There are two small moons in orbit around Mars today, but both may be remnants of a much larger moon that had enough of a gravitational pull to drive tides in the Red Planet's lost lakes and seas

Enceladus’s ocean may be even better for life than we realised

Leah Crane — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 19:00:48 +0000

Plumes of ice particles, water vapour and organic molecules spray from Enceladus’s south polar region

NASA/JPL-Caltech

The liquid water ocean hidden underneath the icy crust of Enceladus has long made this moon of Saturn one of the best prospects in the hunt for extraterrestrial life – and it just got even more promising. The discovery of heat emanating from the frozen moon’s north pole hints the ocean is stable over geological timescales, giving life time to develop there.

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Why we must investigate Phobos, the solar system’s strangest object

“For the first time we can say with certainty that Enceladus is in a stable state, and that has big implications for habitability,” says at the University of Oxford. “We knew that it had liquid water, all sorts of organic molecules, heat, but the stability was really the final piece of the puzzle.”

Howett and her colleagues used data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, to hunt for heat seeping out of Enceladus. Its interior is heated by tidal forces as it is stretched and crunched by Saturn’s gravity, but so far this heat has only been caught leaking out of the south polar regions.

For life to have developed in Enceladus’s ocean, it would require balance: the ocean should be putting out as much heat as is being put in. Measurements of the heat coming out of the south pole don’t account for all of the heat input, but Howett and her team found the north pole is about 7°C warmer than we previously thought. Combined with the heat radiating from the south pole, that matches the total almost exactly – the ice shell is thicker around the equator, so heat only escapes in significant amounts at the poles.

This means the ocean should be stable over long periods of time. “It’s really hard to put a number on it, but we don’t think it’s going to freeze out anytime soon, or that it’s been frozen out anytime recently,” says Howett. “We know life needs time to evolve, and now we can say that it does have that stability.” Actually finding that life, if it is there, is another story entirely. But both NASA and ESA have missions in the works to look for it over the coming decades.

Journal reference

Science Advances

New moon discovered orbiting Uranus is its smallest one

Matthew Sparkes — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 17:20:15 +0000

Astronomers have found a new moon nested among the 28 others near Uranus

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, M. El Mou

A small and dim moon has been discovered in orbit around Uranus, bringing the planet’s total to 29. Many of the ice giant’s other moons are named after characters from works by William Shakespeare, and scientists are now debating which of his characters may lend the body its name.

The new moon was discovered by a team led by at Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, using 10 long-exposure infrared images taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on 2 February this year.

The moon currently has the provisional name . But in time it will probably be named along the same lines as 27 of Uranus’ moons: taking a character’s name from one of Shakespeare’s plays. This convention dates back to the discovery of the planet’s first two moons, Titania and Oberon, in 1787.

The chosen name for the newly-found moon will need to be approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the leading authority on assigning official names and designations to astronomical objects. at the SETI Institute, who was part of the research team and is a self-confessed theatre fan, says there have been discussions but no shortlist yet.

Showalter says spotting a moon so small and dim was a difficult task. “It’s a tiny object right next to a very, very bright object. It’s like staring into the headlight of a car and trying to look at a fly,” he says. “The James Webb telescope is an extraordinary instrument that is vastly more sensitive than any other telescope that has ever existed, frankly.”

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Saturn gains 128 moons, giving it more than the other planets combined

There is hope more moons may be found around Uranus, says Showalter. “We certainly haven’t finished the job,” he says. “I think it’s reasonable to assume that there are more satellites out there. We always suspected that there might be some satellites within the ring system that are kind of what we call shepherding moons, that push the ring material around. We haven’t found any of those yet, but that’s a major focus for our ongoing work.”

El Moutamid says the sharpness of Uranus’ rings indicate there are likely to be more moons, yet undiscovered, that helped with the rings’ formation. “There are probably a lot of more out there that are just waiting for us to detect them,” she says. Some of these may be found by JWST, but there could be a rash discovered by the proposed Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission in 2044 if it goes ahead as planned. “Probably there are plenty of moons out there that are very tiny, and we just cannot detect them yet because of the resolution that we have so far,” she says.

S/2025 U 1 is estimated to be around 10 kilometres in diameter, meaning it is too small to have been seen by the cameras aboard the Voyager 2 probe. Voyager 2 launched in 1977 and passed by Uranus in 1986, coming as close as 81,500 kilometres. It remains the closest pass to Uranus by a spacecraft from Earth.

Is our cosmos just a membrane on the edge of a far stranger reality?

String theory may be our best attempt at a theory of everything, except that it can't describe an expanding universe like ours. Now a radical new twist on the idea could finally fix that – but it requires us to completely reimagine reality

The new moon is at the edge of Uranus’ inner rings, located around 56,250 kilometres from its centre in the planet’s equatorial plane. This places it between the orbits of the moons Ophelia and Bianca.

NASA operates a “General Observer” program for JWST, which allows any scientist around the world to propose targets that require one of the telescope’s advanced sensors. El Moutamid applied for time on JWST’s NIRCam instrument – a high resolution infrared sensor – to study the rings of Uranus. That application led to the discovery of this new little moon.

One half of the moon is hotter than the other

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan — Wed, 14 May 2025 15:00:48 +0000

A map showing anomalies in the moon’s gravitational field, based on data from NASA’s GRAIL mission

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MIT/GSFC

Earth’s gravitational pull on the moon has revealed that our satellite’s interior is warmer on its near side, the one facing our planet, suggesting its insides are uneven.

We have known that the moon’s near side looks different from its far side since we first began observing it. But we haven’t been sure whether that difference reflects something quite literally deeper – something under the moon’s surface, says at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. He and his colleagues have now used data from to prove it does.

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Why we must investigate Phobos, the solar system’s strangest object

In the GRAIL mission, two spacecraft orbited the moon in 2011 and 2012 while collecting data on how the moon’s gravity affected their respective motion. Because its gravitational field reflects its physical features, this let researchers calculate the moon’s shape and how it is deformed by the tidal pull of the Earth.

But the details of this gravitational field couldn’t be explained by just the outer lunar appearance – researchers had to consider whether the interior could be uneven. Past studies predicted that the moon’s near side would deform more than its far side in response to Earth’s pull, says at the University of Arizona. The new work confirms that and “provides a new look into the interior of the moon”, he says.

Park and his team used the GRAIL data to precisely calculate how susceptible the moon is to changing shape in response to Earth’s gravity. They found that this measure is 72 per cent larger than it would be if the moon’s interior were perfectly even and symmetrical.

The team explored different reasons for this anomaly, such as the chemical make-up of the moon. But the model that best matched the measurements was one where the near side of the moon’s interior is warmer than its far side: a lopsided temperature distribution.

at Columbia University in New York says that this model of the lunar interior is also consistent with what we know about the moon’s volcanic history and the distribution of radioactive elements, such as uranium and thorium, close to its surface.

How exactly the moon ended up this way remains an open question, though some of its uneven insides may be due to a history of collisions with other objects, says Park. Going forward, he and his team want to use seismic measurements of so-called moonquakes to strengthen their understanding of the lunar interior. Those measurements will come from instruments like the , which NASA plans to launch in 2026.

How astonishing observatories could do big physics from the moon

As humanity prepares to return to the moon, scientists also have ideas for huge lunar experiments that could revolutionise astrophysics

Journal reference

Nature

Moons news, articles and features | New Ů��С��Ƶ

Hundreds of new moons are revealing our solar system’s violent history

The rings of Uranus are even stranger than we thought

Titan’s strange plains may be explained by unusual weather

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The history and future of space exploration: US

Saturn’s rings may have formed after a huge collision with Titan

Synchronised volcanic eruptions on Io hint at a spongy interior

More than 100 moons were discovered in our own solar system in 2025

Mars may once have had a much larger moon

Enceladus’s ocean may be even better for life than we realised

Mysteries of the universe: Cheshire, England

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New moon discovered orbiting Uranus is its smallest one

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The world capital of astronomy: Chile

One half of the moon is hotter than the other

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